“GENDER-EQUAL SOCIETY”

Since about 1995, the Japanese government promoted initiatives that led to the 1999 Basic Law for a Gender Equal Society and the subsequent Basic Plan for a Gender Equal Society (danjo kyōdō sankaku kihon keikaku 男女共同参画基本計画). The specific terminology in these documents is worth scrutinizing in some detail, as it provides significant insight into the intentions and compromises among those who were involved in drawing up these initiatives.

Although “gender equal” is the official English translation given for 男女共同参画 danjo kyōdō sankaku, the Japanese phrase actually means “male female joint participation.” It is an intentionally vague phrase that avoids the Japanese word 平等 byōdō, meaning ‘equality’. The strategic choice of this phrase has been explained by Ōsawa Mari 大澤真理, a feminist economist who has served in the government's Council for Gender Equality 男女共同参画審議会, the main body responsible for formulating the Basic Law. Ōsawa points out that conservative politicians have long been wary of the term 男女平等 danjo byōdō, because they associate it with equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity, and hence with practices such as affirmative action and quotas – “the paraphernalia of ‘Western-style’ feminism.”Footnote ⁷ So the term byōdō had to be avoided from the start.

On the other hand, some scholars have also pointed out that the phrase danjo byōdō has been associated with a subtle form of discrimination through differentiation: the Ministry of Education has long used the phrase to signify that men and women have different qualities and capabilities and should be treated accordingly along different lines – albeit with equal respect.Footnote ⁸ This “theory of different qualities of men and women” (danjo tokusei ron 男女特性論) would lead to justifying different curricula for boys and girls based on their “natural” qualities, talents, and destinies: requiring home economics for girls, technical arts for boys.Footnote ⁹ These alternate interpretations are enough to tell us that byōdō is a contentious and contested term in Japanese discourse.

It may also be worth noting that sankaku 参画 is a rather unusual word and is hardly ever used in daily conversation.Footnote ¹⁰ The more common term sanka 参加 also denotes participation, but the difference between the two terms is telling: the kaku 画 of sankaku denotes ‘planning’, while the ka 加 of the more familiar sanka denotes ‘adding’. Some have pointed out that sanka could just mean inviting women to events planned and hosted by men, in an “add women and stir” approach to gender equality. Sankaku, by contrast, is a term that connotes participation in planning, and arguably calls for a much greater role for women in society.Footnote ¹¹

So although some feminists have insisted that the more familiar and straightforward danjo byōdō should be used instead of the less familiar and more officious danjo kyōdō sankaku, and thus have celebrated any occasion when the phrase danjo byōdō was adopted in an official context,Footnote ¹² it turns out that this could actually be a more multivalent and potentially contested term than danjo kyōdō sankaku, which at least has a legally defined meaning, delineated through the Basic Law.Footnote ¹³ Although the most accurate translation for danjo kyōdō sankaku might be “male female joint planning and participation,” we will abbreviate it in this article as DKS. We will not follow the Japanese government's rather duplicitous practice of using the English phrase “gender-equal society” to refer to DKS unless it is to make a specific point. It may not be too far a stretch to say that what lies at the heart of the recent debates is precisely the difference between “gender” and danjo (‘male–female’) as well as the difference between “equality” and kyōdō sankaku (‘joint planning and participation’).

WHAT IS “GENDER FREE”?

“Gender free” as a term, on the other hand, had its own genealogy within Japanese discourse, and since the backlash initially started as an attack against the ideas and practices associated with “gender free,” it is worth looking at these a little further as well. The term has been traced back to Barbara Houston's article “Should Public Education Be Gender Free?,”Footnote ¹⁴ although the Japanese appropriation of the term seems to have been based on a misreading of this article.Footnote ¹⁵ Houston was actually critical of the idea of “gender free” educational practices because they could lead to ignoring existing gender discrimination. Houston instead advocated “gender sensitive” educational practices. In 1995 the term “jendā furī” ジェンダー・フリー began to be used by a major women's organization funded by the Tokyo metropolitan government, the Tokyo Women's Foundation (Tokyo josei zaidan 東京女性財団), and by 2001 it had become a widely used term in government, education, and mass media, though its definition was also wide-ranging.Footnote ¹⁶

Part of the confusion arose from the fact that “gender free” began to be used widely around the time when the term “barrier free” (baria furī バリア・フリー) became the buzzword in Japan to refer to accessibility for the disabled. Since “barrier free” means eliminating barriers for the disabled, “gender free” can come to mean “eliminating gender.” This was not the intention of most of those who used the term “gender free” – most used it to mean “free from gender bias.” But as we will see later, the backlash would target exactly this blurriness between “eliminating gender” and “free from gender bias”; by deliberately confusing these distinct definitions, the backlash would raise the specter of a society of unisex school locker rooms and co-ed sleepovers as part of its campaign.

FORTUITOUS OR INEVITABLE?

How did the government policy for a “gender equal society” (i.e. for DKS) come into existence, and what explains its remarkably progressive nature? There are answers that point to fortuitous circumstances, the right things happening at the right time. These include the fact that the generally conservative Liberal Democratic Party was forced into coalition with two more progressive parties, both led by women, in the years 1996–1998.Footnote ¹⁷ On the other hand there are answers that point to the larger historical forces and global trends. These include the rise of international feminism as well as the rise of domestic grassroots feminism. The more weight is given to the “fortuitous” elements, the more understandable seems the outbreak of backlash, and more grim the prospects for continued advancement for feminists. Conversely, the more weight that is given to the “inevitable” elements, the more tempting it becomes to dismiss the backlash as a temporary setback.Footnote ¹⁸

The significant impact of internationalism in Japanese gender policy has been well documented.Footnote ¹⁹ As in many other countries, the United Nations International Decade for Women 1975–1985 was the catalyst for the creation of a national machinery in Japan to address women's issues. The series of World Conferences on Women punctuating the decade (Mexico City 1975, Copenhagen 1980, Nairobi 1985) further promoted the development of both international and domestic feminism. The International Women's Year Liaison Group (Kokusai fujinnen renrakukai 国際婦人年連絡会) founded in 1975 in Japan through the initiative of Diet members Ichikawa Fusae 市川房枝 and others, operated as an umbrella organization for domestic women's groups.Footnote ²⁰ The IWY Liaison Group became one of the most powerful national women's organizations, gaining what amounts to a representational monopoly on women's interests through its large membership base and political connections. The government established regular channels of communication with this umbrella group, thus maintaining an efficient and manageable way to incorporate women's voices into policymaking.Footnote ²¹ The impact of international feminism on Japanese women's issues thus has by now a decades-long history.Footnote ²²

In a more direct way, one may count the “Beijing effect” and the “souvenir effect” as among the factors that led to the Basic Law.Footnote ²³ The “Beijing effect” refers to the way in which the 1995 Fourth World Women's Conference in Beijing, with its Declaration and Platform for Action, galvanized both domestic women's groups and international pressure for improving the status of women; the “souvenir effect” refers to the way in which the Basic Law's passage was enabled by the Japanese government's desire to tout it as an achievement at the so-called “Beijing + Five” follow-up conference in New York in 2000. The Beijing Joint Accountability Committee (known as “北京 JAC”) was a new Japanese group that emerged from this process; it was less hierarchical in structure than the older IWY Liaison Group, and sought to contact and lobby policymakers more directly.Footnote ²⁴

It is worth noting that this international pressure would eventually leave state feminism vulnerable to backlash based on nationalist sentiment. If one chooses to tell the story of DKS as arising through internationalism and top-down directives rather than through a domestic groundswell, then that opens up the way to claim that DKS is foreign to Japanese tradition and has little social support. Conversely, if both the state feminist policies and the backlash can claim to have support from the grassroots, then this suggests the existence of a profound division within Japanese society.

A narrative about how internationalism has enabled the rise of state feminist policy should, however, be complemented by a narrative about domestic trends, without which the international pressure would not have found traction. These domestic trends are epitomized by the phase “age of women” (onna no jidai 女の時代), which became a slogan for activists as well as advertisers in the mid- to late 1980s. As the percentage of women employed in wage-earning work outside the home exceeded 50 per cent in the 1980s, a trend that the passing of the EEOL both fueled and reflected, women became increasingly important as wage earners and consumers. Women also became more active in the political arena, as female candidates swept through elections supported by activist housewives, memorably described by political scientist Robin LeBlanc as “bicycle citizens.”Footnote ²⁵ Feminism as intellectual discourse bloomed in this climate as well, and books with “feminizumu” フェミニズム in the title sprang up and multiplied on bookstore shelves.Footnote ²⁶ Many scholars involved in this boom of feminist discourse were also actively involved in governmental and non-governmental women's groups. In a trend that has continued to the present day, national and local governments have mobilized women scholars as experts in its various advisory councils addressing issues of concern to women.Footnote ²⁷ These domestic trends in the late 1980s and 1990s have worked together with international trends described above.Footnote ²⁸ As domestic women's groups increasingly engaged in electoral politics and policy-making at various levels, international pressures also led the government to create a national machinery to address women's issues. The fact that Japanese women, including both government officials and NGO members, comprised one of the largest delegations at the 1995 Beijing Conference as well as at the 2000 Beijing + Five Conference provides one index of this conjunction of domestic and international feminism.

RESULTS AND INITIAL REACTIONS

There have been two significant positive results of the passage of the Basic Law. The first is a new administrative structure that strengthened the agencies in charge of gender policy. The move was intended to “mainstream” gender policy, and is considered to have created a “national machinery” for advancing women's rights in Japan.Footnote ³⁶ Ōsawa Mari has noted that gender policy under DKS was no longer marginalized in a particular ministry within the bureaucratic structure, but was centrally located in the Gender Equality Bureau (danjo kyōdō sankaku kyoku 男女共同参画局) within the Cabinet Office (naikakufu 内閣府). The ability to intervene in the work of other ministries and agencies made the Gender Equality Bureau especially powerful.Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, each ministry and agency was required to create an administrative division charged with DKS initiatives – even within the Defense Agency. Prefectural and local governments also established their own administrative offices and advisory councils for achieving the goals of DKS.Footnote ³⁸

A second outcome of the Basic Law are the various ordinances for DKS passed by prefectures, cities, and further down the municipal hierarchy. Ordinances (jōrei 条例) are the highest kind of legislation that can be passed at these municipal levels, and by calling for these ordinances, and the drawing up of concrete local plans for promoting DKS, the Basic Law fulfilled the function of being a blueprint for change.

Initial reactions to these policies were muted and cautious. It is in fact difficult to find strong early responses, either positive or negative. Some have noted that DKS was not taken seriously by the male establishment.Footnote ³⁹ Ueno Chizuo likened the DKS to a painting of rice cakes (e ni kaita mochi 絵に描いた餅), a well-known metaphor for something that is theoretical and without substance, and at another point as “candy” (amedama 飴玉) – something to toss to children, or in this case women, to stop their complaints, but nothing that will truly satisfy their hunger.Footnote ⁴⁰

One way to gauge the responses to DKS is to track the appearance of journal articles. The National Diet Library's NDL-OPAC database allows us to see, for example, that the term “danjo kyōdō sankaku” begins appearing in titles in 1991, with one article listed for that year, and that the number of articles rises steadily but rather slowly during the decade, until it more than doubles from 59 articles in 1998 to 155 articles in 1999, the year the Basic Law passed. The number peaks around 2002, but remains in the triple digits to the present. On the other hand, articles with “gender free” in the title begin to appear in 1996 with three articles listed for that year. In the first four years, all references seem to be to positive, but in 2000 the first negative article appears, peaking in 2003 with 22 out of 48 articles taking a negative position against the term. Data such as this support the claim that DKS and “gender free” were not initially received with much academic or journalistic fanfare.

Another way to consider the initial responses is to turn to feminist publications, which are logical places to look for early reactions to these state feminist initiatives. An exemplary case is Agora あごら, one of the longest-enduring journals of the Japanese women's movement.Footnote ⁴¹ It published the Council's initial discussion points on DKS and relayed the government's request for “public comment,” publicizing the various meetings to be held for citizens to express their opinions.Footnote ⁴² But this journal itself declined to take an editorial stance either for or against DKS. This was in marked contrast to the stance it had taken a decade earlier on the EEOL, which it had memorably derided as a “inexplicable law to ban equality” 奇怪禁等法, a pun on “kikai kintō hō　機会均等法” the short version of the Japanese term for “equal opportunity law.”

Various explanations have been given for the initial feminist coolness, even indifference towards DKS, including the fact that the policy seemed to target married couples with children, which struck many feminists as irrelevant to their own struggles to assert women's identities independent of wifehood and motherhood.Footnote ⁴³ Early feminist critiques also noted those dimensions of the policy that amounted to a compromise between the interests of feminists (who wanted to challenge the gendered division of labor), conservative government officials (who wanted to boost the birthrate), and business leaders (who wanted more women to remain in the workforce).Footnote ⁴⁴ What is also suggestive is that the emergence of “state feminism” – sometimes also disparagingly called “state policy feminism” (kokusaku feminizumu 国策フェミニズム), “institutional feminism” (taiseinai feminizumu 体制内フェミニズム), “administrative feminism” (gyōsei feminizumu 行政フェミニズム) or “bureaucratic feminism” (kanryō feminizumu 官僚フェミニズム) – was regarded by many women with suspicion, and hence the state promotion of seemingly feminist goals was met with skepticism.Footnote ⁴⁵ There was an emerging split in the 1990s between those who would commit to state feminism and those who would maintain a distance from it. The background of this is related to the history of Japanese women's mobilization by the state, discussed below.

THE BACKLASH

What was the background of the backlash, who were the people and organizations involved, and what were the main arguments? There is no doubt that the resurgence of nationalism has been one of the engines behind the phenomenon. For example, the popular base for the backlash had much in common with that which supported the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (atarashii rekishi kyōkasho o tsukuru kai 新しい歴史教科書をつくる会). The group sought to create a new set of overtly nationalist textbooks, in order to correct what it described as the self-flagellating (jigyaku teki 自虐的) tendency of the Japanese educational curriculum vis-à-vis Japanese colonial and wartime actions. The inclusion of the so-called ‘military comfort women’ (jūgun ianfu 従軍慰安婦) issue in the state-approved middle-school history textbooks was an especially contentious point.Footnote ⁴⁶ Once the controversy began to die down, the nationalists' attention turned to gender as the next target.Footnote ⁴⁷

The turn to gender issues was likely prompted by another controversy, namely over surnames of married couples.Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1996, the government's advisory council on legal systems proposed that the civil code be revised to introduce the option of married couples keeping their respective surnames (fūfu bessei 夫婦別姓). For the growing cohort of women sustaining professional careers after marriage, it had become a major inconvenience to have to change one's surname mid-career. Despite the fact that this revision was proposed during a time of feminist upswing, it faced severe political opposition. Conservatives argued that separate surnames would lead to the collapse of the family, tapping into a wider anxiety about social change under demographic as well as neo-liberal pressures.Footnote ⁴⁹ The forces against the proposal formed an association called the Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi 日本会議) in 1997, which soon grew into the largest coalition of conservative groups in Japan.Footnote ⁵⁰ Scholars have pointed out that the eventual backlash against gender policy brought together several disparate sets of advocates, including the advocates for nationalist textbooks and advocates against separate surnames.Footnote ⁵¹

The beginnings of the backlash can be traced back even further, however, to certain developments since the late 1980s. It was at that time, for example, that Yamashita Etsuko 山下悦子, a scholar who had previously published insightful studies of Japanese feminism,Footnote ⁵² began taking contemporary Japanese feminists to task for misrepresenting the true needs of women. Yamashita's main claim was that contemporary Japanese feminism had fallen into an uncritical celebration of capitalism and consumerism, ignoring the needs of married women burdened with childcare and eldercare.Footnote ⁵³

Meanwhile, Hayashi Michiyoshi 林道義, a Jungian psychologist, had begun publishing a number of books in which he advocated the return to the traditional family, with a strong father as authority figure.Footnote ⁵⁴ He later buttressed it with a book calling for the return of the housewife as the exemplary female figure, as well as a book directly attacking feminism.Footnote ⁵⁵ These books, too, resonated in a discursive space in which certain successes of the women's movement, such as the raising of awareness about the problems inhering in the sexual division of labor, were blamed for concrete problems in contemporary society, such as the rise in youth crime and higher divorce rates. These earlier intellectual rumblings suggest that the backlash connected with a larger conservative discourse that had emerged by the mid-1990s as a shadow accompanying the splendid spectacles of the “women's age.”

There were thus several elements that came together in the backlash, including “old conservatives” who had been prominent for several decades,Footnote ⁵⁶ “new conservatives” who had become vocal within the last decade,Footnote ⁵⁷ conservative politicians,Footnote ⁵⁸ religious organizations,Footnote ⁵⁹ and grassroots activists.Footnote ⁶⁰ There is also evidence that the backlash was orchestrated at a higher level, and the “relay play” within the conservative Sankei 産経 media network played a significant role. First, certain journals such as Seiron 正論 would feature articles by so-called “experts” that would include unsubstantiated episodes about the egregious results of “gender free education”; second, these same articles would be picked up by newspapers owned by the same media conglomerate as the journals, i.e. the Sankei shinbun 産經新聞; third, these articles would then be cited by local and national diet members in their questioning of policy; fourth, this questioning would be reported as news by the same journal and newspapers.Footnote ⁶¹ By the end of the media relay, the initial musings of a few pundits have been transformed into newsworthy facts. This tactic illustrates how a small group of conservative voices can come to play a crucial role in forming public opinion. Government bodies sensitive to the critiques from politicians and mass media would begin to institute self-censorship, and eventually the self-censoring moves would begin to replicate themselves throughout society in a vicious cycle.Footnote ⁶²

Politically, the backlash gained traction within conservative and neo-nationalist circles. Yamatani Eriko, a former journalist and editor for the Sankei media network, won a seat for the Lower House in 2000 and went to on head the Liberal Democratic Party's “Project Team for Investigating the Status of Radical Sex Education and Gender Free Education” 過激な性教育 ジェンダーフリー教育に関する 実態調査プロジェクトチーム. The Project Team's “evidence” for rampant radical sex education was eventually discredited by scholars who pointed out that the explicit nature of some of the practices (such as using anatomically correct dolls) were due to the fact that they took place in the context of educating children with special needs. Other instances cited by the Project Team were anecdotal and not supported by verifiable information. Yet the damage had been done. The bashing of sex education, and the retreat to a moralistic education stressing sexual purity over sexual health, were combined with an attack against “gender free” educational reforms that had sought to correct decades of subtle sexual discrimination, such as putting the class roster of boys before the roster of girls.Footnote ⁶³ By the end of 2005, “gender free” was singled out in the government's Second Basic Plan for Gender Equality as a term to be avoided because it would lead to confusion.Footnote ⁶⁴ The backlash had thus reached the highest levels of government.Footnote ⁶⁵

While the nationalist undertones of the backlash undoubtedly point to the continued power of conservatives in Japan, there are also other dynamics concurrently at work as well. The backlash seems to have tapped into a surprisingly widespread sense of anxiety and resentment, especially among young men alienated in the neo-liberal transformation of Japanese society.Footnote ⁶⁶ Internet websites, bulletin boards and blogs have been important loci for the spread of this discourse. Other factors that have fueled the backlash include the continued bleak picture of the economy and an increasing fear that the future looks even bleaker, the specter of Japan's decline in international status as China becomes more dominant, compounded with the sense of social decline as the population ages and the birthrate fails to rise. The conservative turn is exacerbated by the continued “exiting” of women from the workplace and potential spheres of influence,Footnote ⁶⁷ as well as the continued dominance of older men in politics. The backlash found traction precisely because Japan had been mired in these conditions for at least a decade by 2005.

The argument of the backlash advocates can be summarized as a kind of biological essentialism: their main claim is that there are natural biological differences between men and women, and that this would dictate different social roles for men and women.Footnote ⁶⁸ The claim is that the state feminist policy (DKS) of promoting the continued employment of women during the childbearing years destroys the “traditional Japanese family” consisting of the male breadwinner and the full-time housewife. Ironically, such a “traditional family” had become the norm in Japan only for about a decade, in the 1970s, during the period of high economic growth.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet the conservative discourse found receptive ears in the segment of the Japanese population that identified with the fading vision of such a family. In essence, the state feminist policy upset both men, who felt accused of not doing enough to help with housework and childcare, as well as women, who felt rebuked for not holding on to their jobs while raising children. What proved problematic was precisely the potential of DKS to challenge the traditional sexual division of labor.

FEMINIST FIGHT BACK AND BACK-PEDALING

What has been the response from the feminist activists and scholars to the backlash? The most visible response to the backlash has come from academic feminists: there has been an unprecedented level of networking and alliance building among scholars. Even those who were initially cautious about the term “gender free” have come to realize that the backlash targets more than this term: it is a crisis with the potential to threaten the entire range of ideas and practices associated with feminism, women's rights, and gender equality. Even the concept of “gender” itself – signifying socially and culturally constructed differences to be distinguished from biological sexual difference – has come to be questioned. The Science Council of Japan (Nihon Gakujutsu Kaigi 日本学術会議) created a “Scholarship and Gender” committee to respond to the crisis, pulling together prominent feminist scholars such as Ōsawa Mari, Ueno Chizuko, and Ehara Yumiko 江原由美子.Footnote ⁷⁰ The Women's Studies Association of Japan (Nihon Josei Gakkai 日本女性学会) published a book with detailed information refuting the arguments of the backlash.Footnote ⁷¹ A number of other edited volumes have appeared, constituting a feminist “fight back” ファイトバック.Footnote ⁷² It should be noted, however, that certain differences in position and emphasis have emerged among those fighting back: some see the defense of government policy for gender equality as primary, while others would continue to maintain some critical distance from it; some see the emphasis on “gender free” as misplaced, preferring to emphasize equal treatment of men and women instead, while others would continue to insist on the importance of dismantling gender norms at a more fundamental level.

The backlash directly targeted the term and ideas associated with “gender free.” The allegation has been that gender free education and the more radical aspects of DKS would lead to an elimination of all sex and gender difference: unisex bathrooms and locker-rooms, girls and boys sleeping together in the same room on overnight school trips, and so forth. Much of this is unfounded, and also familiar to those who remember the backlash against the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States that called forth similar specters of a sexless society to induce panic and confusion.

Some scholars have argued that the term “gender free” is not only based on a misreading of the original use, but is also misleading in many ways and should thus be abandoned as a feminist term. Yamaguchi Tomomi 山口智美 and Saitō Masami 斉藤正美 are among those who advocate a return to the more straightforward term of danjo byōdō, i.e. equality between men and women. The same scholars also object to those aspects of both the government-led and independently organized aspects of the “gender free” initiatives that focus on consciousness-raising and education, arguing that the emphasis should be placed on eliminating discriminatory practices rather than on changing consciousness.Footnote ⁷³

The state seems eager to drop “gender free” altogether. The Second Plan for DKS in 2005 stated that the term “gender free” is confusing, and in 2006, the Gender Equality Bureau issued a recommendation that local governments avoid using the term.Footnote ⁷⁴ The government back-pedaling on “gender free” can be seen as a tactical move to rescue the core ideas of DKS: equal treatment of women and men. The feminist critique of “gender free” is also motivated by the desire to push this core idea forward. But there is an aspect to this trend that could be worrisome.

The concept of “gender free” in its most inclusive moments gestured not only beyond binary definitions of femininity and masculinity, but also pointed to the fundamental instability of categories such as sex, gender, and sexuality. In doing so, gender free had the potential to reach out to transgender and transsexual individuals as well as to gays and lesbians. In other words, it is my view that “gender free” in Japan overlapped with the concept that is known in Anglo-American contexts as “queer.” The introduction and spread of the concept and practices associated with the term “gender free” coincided with the growing discursive visibility of sexual minorities. It is worth remembering that individuals such as Kakefuda Yuko 掛札悠子 and Fushimi Noriaki 伏見憲明 had begun coming out in publications since the early 1990s, and there was a spate of books on lesbian and gay studies in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, authors such as Tsutamori Tatsuru 蔦森樹 (MtF) and Torai Masae 虎井まさ衛 (FtM) published books about their experience as transgender and/or transsexual individuals. In 1998 the Japanese medical establishment came to recognize Gender Identity Disorder as a medical condition, with sexual reassignment surgery becoming legally available in 2003. Meanwhile, in 1999 the journal Queer Japan クィア ジャパン began publishing, and 2008 saw the founding of the Japan Association for Queer Studies クィア学会.

It seems quite possible that “gender free” had the potential to connect these existing and emerging populations and the presumably much larger population that has felt, to various degrees, constrained by the rigid gender norms operating in Japanese society. Why can a person (of any sex or gender or sexual persuasion) not wear a skirt one day and trousers the next? Why can a person not have long hair one season and a buzz the next? Why not be gender free?Footnote ⁷⁵ The back-pedaling on the part of the government as well as on the part of some within the feminist community cuts off this potential connection and retreats to a heteronormative position. While DKS comes out of a feminist tradition of critiquing the male breadwinner and female housewife model,Footnote ⁷⁶ it has not fundamentally critiqued the normative heterosexual family model. That precisely was the unusual potential opened up by “gender free” as an idea and initiative. And in retreating to a position that proclaims “we don't want to be gender free; we just want equal treatment of women and men,” the heterosexist dimension of DKS would be maintained, and the queer potential would be disavowed.Footnote ⁷⁷

A HISTORY OF STATE MOBILIZATION OF WOMEN

What are the connections and differences between the present controversy and the collaboration between feminism and the state in previous moments in Japanese history? A historical perspective proves highly instructive. The close collaboration of prominent feminists with the colonial and militarist efforts of the state has been well documented.Footnote ⁷⁸ Women's groups cooperated with the state in prewar as well as in postwar Japan. The government saw this a kind of social management, using women's groups for its own agenda, while women's groups had their own reasons for this cooperation. In the prewar period, women's lack of formal political powers meant that many groups found it useful to ally themselves with state bureaucrats in order to accomplish their goals.Footnote ⁷⁹ Autonomous women's groups were of course likely to be persecuted and resistance to the state was punished.Footnote ⁸⁰ Although some feminists tried to resist mobilization into the war effort, they were few, and most were silenced. Most feminists saw the war as an opportunity.Footnote ⁸¹

In the postwar period, this cooperation continued for various reasons. Some scholars have pointed out that women have tended to look to the state to achieve their goals because autonomous citizen's groups have been masculinist and unwelcoming to women's efforts.Footnote ⁸² Miriam Murase shows in her important study of the postwar women's movement that the government has constrained the autonomy of the women's movement through official women's groups and women's centers.Footnote ⁸³ This has created a division between mainstream women's groups close to the state, and radical feminist groups opposed to the state. The emergence of state feminism in the 1990s did little to alter this basic picture. Though more scholars identifying themselves as feminist have been drawn into the various state-sponsored projects for gender equal society, many remain fundamentally skeptical of the goals and methods of government policies.

Some of the trends we have observed in state feminism in contemporary Japan are found in other advanced industrialized nations as well, but some important divergences are also visible. In countries with the most effective forms of state feminism, such as Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway, the offices in charge of feminist issues were set up under social democratic governments that prioritized gender equity. Scholars and activists with backgrounds in women's studies were often called to leadership positions at crucial stages in this process, and the term femocrat, coined in Australia in the 1970s, has come to be used generally as a term denoting feminist experts working within government institutions. In each of these “high state feminism” countries, it is also notable that a combination of mainstream and more radical feminist groups have exerted strong pressure on the state, within political climates emphasizing the role of the state in redressing social inequality.Footnote ⁸⁴

In the case of Japan, the DKS machinery was put in place under a relatively progressive coalition government with the involvement of party leaders, bureaucrats, and feminist scholars who strongly pushed for gender equity. With the collapse of the coalition and the return to a more conservative regime in 1998, the backlash was able to gain traction and eventually reach the highest levels of government. The more liberal Democratic Party of Japan took over in the summer of 2009, but a sense of political paralysis at the top has prevailed. There are few remaining signs of the confluence of domestic and international feminism that had pushed the state towards feminist policy-making in the 1990s. The academic feminist community has fought back vigorously against the backlash, and government advisory councils remain potential arenas for feminist scholars to influence policy, but the long-term impact of these efforts still remains to be seen.